As in the three square meals I had today. I have a concept of “food security” which has been working for me. I find that if I wait to eat until I am hungry, it makes it more stressful to have to decide what I am going to eat, or to discover I don’t have anything handy that I do want. Having lunch meat or other shortcut foods around doesn’t seem to work all the time. Maybe they get boring! So I make sure I have appealing foods, cooked, portioned, and ready to heat and eat. It’s like the Doctor’s MREs. Today I had two such meals and one fresh-cooked dinner, one of my all time favorites: Beef and Broccol stir fry.
My food intake and calorie count
Breakfast – 10oz slow cooker sausage, ziti, and cheese bake (390);
- 390 calories
Lunch – 1/2 pounds of pork burger (540); Lavash wrap (60);
- 600 calories
Dinner – 5oz cooked rice (160); beef and broccoli stir-fry (315);
- 375 calories
Snacking – 110g ice cream (300); pretzels (50);
- 350 calories
Total for the day: 1815 calories (limit 1850)
Future imperfect
When I was little, homemade beef and broccoli stir-fry was part of my favorite dinner and I asked for it every year on my birthday. Of course back then I didn’t think about portions, but I did learn that dinner is best when you are hungry. I remember my parents introducing the concept of measuring food on a diet they tried sometime back then. I don’t remember what it was called, but I do recall they had a few weeks with no meat and then one day was “X ounces of meat day” and they could weigh out a certain amount. I didn’t think about these things when I was developing my own weight control system, but they are in my mind somewhere.
I tried reading about mindset as it relates to weight control and dieting. Try a search on mindset and weight loss yourself and see how many results you find. It’s a lot. But having read about 10 pages there is a lot of bad advice out there. Almost all of them talk about avoiding your scale as a technique. How will you know where you are and in what direction you are going without that? Others repeat the bad advice that you shouldn’t use food as a reward. Of course you should definitely use food as a reward! I’ve lost 90 pounds rewarding myself every meal of every day!
It’s much more sensible to not use food for emotional reasons and be clear about why you are eating. Use food as a physical reward and a sensual reward, not as medication to help your feelings. Every person is a bottomless pit of emotional need (ok maybe that is overstating a bit) and you will eat yourself out of control in no time that way. And the phrasing! Don’t use food as a reward means what, use it for punishment? That’s where my mind goes. I guess there are people who see food only as fuel and neither reward nor punishment, but I am not sure that’s an ideal many people would seek after.
Much better to create a world you would like to live in and then live there. If that world involves meeting your physical need for food with carefully portioned meals that are your favorites….how many people would say no? There is some work involved since you have to actually prepare and plan ahead a bit to make that happen. But it is totally worth it.
-The Doctor